At nine o'clock sharp on Wednesday morning, Bolivian president, Evo Morales, could be found sharing some of his signature straightforward opinions on global politics with a room full of journalists.

"I've become convinced that here in Bolivia it's better for us to govern without the IMF and the US," Morales said, on the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which has attracted over 20,000 indigenous activists, environmental and climate scientists and journalists from all around the world. "If we don't stop this climate crisis, even for transnational companies with all of the money in the world, it won't be worth anything if we leave the earth uninhabitable."

A few hours later the president and a few randomly selected conference attendees from Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Paraguay and Bolivia were engaged in a battle at times more cut-throat than geopolitics – a football match organised for the inaugural celebration of a new government funded sports stadium in the small mountain town of Colomi, close to where Morales started his career as the sports secretary of the Coca growers Union. Beyond the obvious local good cheer that the presidential football match drummed up, it also couldn't hurt to shift attention away from some much-publicised spicy culinary advice Morales dished out the previous day.

Colomi, Bolivia, where the football match took place. Photograph: Asli Pelit

The vans ferrying press to the new stadium in Colomi, an hour outside of Cochabamba, seemed to be running unabashedly on "Bolivian time", finally pulling out two hours after the close of the press conference. In the town of Colomi we parked and followed the sounds of a brass band and a cheering crowd, hiking up the side of a hill and under a broken barbed wire fence to arrive at the new indoor Colomi Coliseum just in time to see the kick-off. On one side, President Morales in green shorts, tennis shoes, and a white football jersey with the number 10 and "Evo" emblazoned on the back, with four other players. They faced off against another small team with a decidedly non-presidential advantage, as thousands of people from the town lined the rafters, watching the match with rapt attention.

"It's a little different for us Argentines to play here, because of the altitude. Up here we're at 2,000 km above sea level. You lose your breath a lot faster," Sebastian Ameirgeiras tells me, a doctor who works in a clinic in Buenos Aires. Sebastian and 10 other players were plucked from a lottery of participants at the climate meeting in Cochabamba, and included players from Venezuela, Paraguay, Chile, and of course Bolivia. "I came to Cochabamba to talk about how climate change is impacting public health. Who knew I'd end up playing soccer with the president?"

Evo Morales playing football. Photograph: Joseph Huff-Hannon

Throughout the match two MCs provided a running play-by-play commentary of the action on the floor, while giving regular plugs about the glory of the new stadium, and booster-ish announcements about the salutary effects of exercise, and the Morales government's role in supporting sports programmes around the country.

"We're kind of used to it by now, he's visited us three or four times already," Marcelo Quiroga tells me, a local mechanic who came out to see the game. When asked his opinion on Morales's aptitude for the game, Quiroga gave me a quizzical look and pointed to the gym floor: "See for yourself." A few minutes later, Morales scored his fourth goal.

Fans celebrate the Morales team win. Photograph: Joseph Huff-Hannon

After the game wrapped (9-1, in a landslide win for the president's team), Morales donned civilian garb, and joined a huge scrum of locals and journalists around two long tables set up on the gym floor, where a feast of local specialties was laid out; corn, vegetables, poached fish from a nearby lake, farmers cheese, red and purple potatoes – and a number of large cakes adorned with coca leaves. Chicken was conspicuously absent from the menu.

After the football, the feast. Photograph: Joseph Huff-Hannon

The president shared food, exchanged hugs, and passed plates down the table. After the feast a brass band struck up another tune and presidential bodyguards formed a circle around a group of men and women as they danced together in pairs, where Morales and a woman in a flower bedecked white bowler hat and a rainbow-coloured scarf boogied down to the music.

"He's our first indigenous president, and it shows," Maura Lazarte Vargas tells me, a young woman who lives in Cochabamba but was born here in Colomi, and returns often to visit family. Morales's government has been criticised by some as overly personalistic, relying on the cult of Evo to rally public opinion around its various initiatives. I asked Maura about this, and she told me that it misses the point. It's about tangibles, improvements or lack thereof that people see in their day-to-day lives. "We had other governments who did useful things every now and then, but always from very far away, never right here in the thick of it with us."